Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Music Mix, on
Radio New Zealand National after the 11 o’clock news tonight, features New Zealand
duo Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams. Never heard of them? Neither had I,
until a couple of weeks ago. But I saw them at Aratoi in Masterton on Sunday
night and they are seriously good. In fact I’d go so far as to say that in 40
years of listening to live music here and overseas, I can remember only a handful
of performances that were as satisfying as this one. What’s more, my wife, a
far more exacting critic than I, agrees.

How to describe them? This gets harder with every passing
year as musical genres mutate and overlap, but the best way I can put it is
that their repertoire seamlessly blends classic country with a grittier contemporary
style. On Sunday they paid homage to one or two old country standards that have
almost been forgotten – notably Cool
Water, written in 1936 by Bob Nolan of the Sons of the Pioneers. Some of us
are old enough to recall Cool Water
being a staple on radio request shows in the 1950s, but I would guess many in
the audience at Aratoi were hearing it for the first time.

What impressed me is that while Delaney and Marlon's treatment of songs like
Cool Water and the Cox Family’s I Am Weary – Let Me Rest (from the Coen
Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
is respectful, they make them entirely their own. Williams’ tenor voice is so thrillingly
pure and sweet that it might cause atheists to wonder whether there really is a
god. It put me in mind of the angelic-sounding Louvin Brothers, whose ballad Knoxville Girl wound up
the set on Sunday night (a shame that a muddy sound system made it hard for
many to hear the words – or perhaps not, since the story is pretty gruesome).

Though they don’t normally perform together – Davidson usually tours
solo and Williams has his own Christchurch-based group, the wonderfully named
Unfaithful Ways –they are a natural fit in a yin-and-yang kind of way. Williams provides
the light while Davidson, with his harsher vocal styling and biting guitar, serves
as the shade. They even manage to look like an Antipodean reincarnation of
something from 1930s Kentucky, having adopted an appearance best described as hillbilly
gangster. Davidson wouldn’t look out of place in a Depression-era “Wanted”
poster.

Where these extraordinarily talented, original and
authentic-sounding country acts spring from is a mystery, especially when you
consider that for decades country music in New Zealand subsisted deep
underground where no radio programmers go. Perhaps there’s something in the artesian water down Canterbury way,
where many of them seem to originate.

Another impressive act new to me was Miss Ebony Lamb from
Wellington, who opened for Delaney and Marlon at Aratoi. A singer-songwriter in
the Gillian Welch mould, she presented an impressive original set, flawlessly
accompanied by Wairarapa guitarist Bob Cooper-Grundy and a female accordionist
and fiddler whose name I missed (along with most of the words in Miss Ebony’s
songs – that sound system again).

By coincidence, on RNZ in the early hours of last Saturday morning
I heard an episode of Chris Bourke’s fascinating and sadly under-promoted series Blue Smoke, based on his book tracing
the development of popular music in New Zealand. It happened to include a song
by Rex and Noelene Franklin, stalwarts of New Zealand country music in the 1960s
and 70s.

Fifty years ago in Central Hawkes Bay, Rex taught my brother Paul and I to play
guitar (the first song we learned was May
I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister). Rex has lived through an era when country
music seemed in terminal decline. I don’t know where he lives now, but I bet he’s
thrilled by its unexpected resurgence.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

YOU CAN’T help but feel sorry for John Minto. His brain must
hurt when he wakes up every morning. So many downtrodden people, so many
heartless capitalists, so many injustices – which one will he deal with today?

Images of Minto addressing rag-tag gatherings with a
megaphone are one of the few constants in a chaotic universe. I began compiling
a list of the protests he’s been involved in but it would take up more space
than the editor allows me.

Suffice it to say that in recent years it has encompassed
the oppression of Palestine, unhealthy school food, pokie machines, racist
television presenters, child poverty, wicked Israeli tennis players, income
disparity (Minto was a leading light in the Occupy movement), cricket tours,
the Waihopai spy base, the Ports of Auckland dispute, elitist private schools,
evicted state house tenants, the jailing of Tame Iti, the axing of college
night classes, war mongering in Afghanistan and the war criminal Tony Blair.

You have to admire its broad sweep. Minto is a compulsive
serial protester who sees injustice everywhere. There aren’t enough hours in
the day to expose it all.

As he grows older, he seems to look more intense and
haunted. I don’t recall ever seeing him smile. Does he go home at night, put on
his slippers and enjoy Coro Street? Does he have a pet cat called Fluffy to which he's devoted? Somehow I doubt it. I suspect he sleeps
with a loudhailer under his pillow.

But here’s Minto’s problem: he’s now such a familiar,
predictable fixture at demonstrations that it’s hard to take him seriously.

There was a time when people swore when they saw him on the
TV news, but now they’re just as likely to laugh. There can be no worse fate
for someone with such deeply held convictions, but you sense that Minto is so
absorbed righting the multifarious wrongs of the world that he’s incapable of
seeing himself as others see him.

There was a special poignancy about his latest demo, in
which a motley group threw paint bombs – a spectacularly pointless gesture – at
the South African Consulate in Auckland* in protest at the police massacre of
black miners.

It was poignant because Minto first came to prominence as a
critic of apartheid. Now he’s bitterly condemning the black government that he
was once convinced would deliver liberation and equality.

“Economic apartheid has replaced race-based apartheid,” he
laments. “So the people of South Africa are no better off.”

He seems oblivious to the irony of this outcome. As the
saying goes, you should be careful what you wish for.

* * *

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange is a thorough creep – a
sleazy megalomaniac with a huge sense of entitlement, as reflected in his
expectations of sexual compliance from adoring female followers.

There was a time when many considered Assange a champion of
free speech and exposer of dark government secrets: a man of pure principle,
untainted by ideology. But with the passage of time, it has become clear that
he is on a mammoth ego trip and is highly partisan in his politics.

He’s petulant too, as he demonstrated when he severed his
relationship with Britain’s Left-leaning Guardian
newspaper because it had the temerity to report the Swedish sexual assault
accusations against him.

Now, on top of everything else, Assange stands exposed as a
gross hypocrite. By taking refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London and
heaping praise on the Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa , he has aligned
himself with one of the most oppressive regimes in the Western hemisphere – a
government that jails journalists and ranks 127th on the
international press freedom index. So much for his commitment to free speech.

The only people still standing by Assange are the naïve and
gullible and those who, like the sanctimonious Australian journalist John
Pilger, are blinded by their contempt for the West. The first lot don’t know
any better; the second should.* * *

BRITISH American Tobacco is on a hiding to nothing with its
expensive ad campaign against plain cigarette packaging.

With the exception of a tiny minority of smokers’ rights
advocates, the public’s phone is off the hook on this issue. The tobacco
industry is so despised that no amount of whitewashing can make it look good.
Academic arguments about protection of intellectual property may stand up in
court, but will cut no ice with the public.

Anti-liquor zealots like to equate tobacco with alcohol,
which is also in the news this week, but there are crucial differences.

Most drinkers enjoy alcohol in moderation and suffer no
adverse consequences.But there’s no
such thing as safe smoking; and unlike alcohol, which has served as a social
lubricant since time immemorial, tobacco is unredeemed by any social benefits.

* Both TV networks reported that the paint bombs were thrown at the South African consulate, but a letter writer in today's Dominion Post says the building actually houses the offices of a private law firm that occasionally makes a room available to staff from the South African consulate. If true, that makes the vandalism of the protesters even less excusable.

It’s well-known that you should never trust a journalist’s
arithmetic. Canny newspaper subeditors, a breed in danger of imminent
extinction, know this and always double-check reporters’ figures.

Not so widely realised is that journalists’ command of basic
geography is just as suspect. Only recently I read an article in which an
experienced journalist referred to the magnificent view of the Tararuas from a
house in Havelock North.

This weakness obviously extends to the people who write scripts
for TV reality shows such as Coastwatch,
which I happened to see last night. In the opening minutes the programme
referred to Titahi Bay as being on the Kapiti Coast – which starts at
Paekakariki, a good 15 kilometres north – and to a search for a missing crayfish
boat at Te Anau, which is 80 kilometres from the sea.

These may be relatively minor errors in the grand scheme of
things, but they are telling. Do the makers of these shows give a fig for
accuracy? I suspect not.

And don’t get me started on TV journalists’ rudimentary command
of basic grammar. My wife, for whom English was a third language, could barely
believe her ears when she heard a reporter say on TVNZ’s 6 pm bulletin on
Saturday that oil companies had “risen their prices”. God preserve us.

Friday, August 17, 2012

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 15.)

Language is a social and political minefield, one that’s
getting ever harder to navigate.

There was a time when the worst that could happen if you
used the wrong word was that you would be exposed as uncultured or uneducated.

In the 1950s, an English linguist came up with the terms “U”
(for upper-class) and “non-U” to distinguish between the language favoured by the
upper crust and that used by the middle classes. His thesis was that you
revealed your social status by the words you used.

Ironically, “U” people often used a more down-to-earth form
of speech than their social inferiors, who thought that fancy-sounding words
made them sound more refined. Hence it
was “U” to say “false teeth”, “pudding” and “napkin”, whereas non-U people
favoured “dentures”, “dessert” and “serviette”, thinking they sounded more
classy.

The concept of “U” and “non-U” was unknown to my siblings
and me when we were kids but even so, our mother brought us up to prefer
certain words over others, even if they were not in line with popular usage.

For example, we were encouraged to say “lavatory” rather
than the more common “toilet”. Our house had a sitting room rather than a
lounge and we always ate dinner, never “tea”. Mum was anything but a snob, but
she was fussy about correct speech, which may explain why some other kids thought my
family were up themselves.

Back then, you risked committing a social rather than
political faux-pas if you used an infelicitous word of phrase. Things began to
change, however, in the 1960s, when language became politically sensitive.

Black Americans had long been known as Negroes, from the Spanish
word for black. But at about the time of the civil rights movement, Negro
became unacceptable because of its long association with slavery and servitude.
(It was also the source word for nigger, a demeaning term used by white-trash
racists.)

“Black” became the preferred term, but it too fell out of
favour among the politically correct, to be replaced by “African American”.
(Ironically, “black” was once considered more offensive than “Negro” or
“coloured”, showing that where language is concerned, what goes around comes
around.)

With the advent of sexual politics, gender became a touchy language
issue too. Feminists ruled that “lady” was belittling and “girl”, when used as
a synonym for a grown woman, was quite beyond the pale – although strangely
enough, the latter term is still permissible when used by women enjoying a
“girls’ night out” or talking about the “girls” in the netball team.

But if the language of race and sex is fraught with
difficulty, the language surrounding disability is even more problematical.
This was brought home to me recently when the Radio New Zealand programme One in Five examined the issue.

What emerged was that while many people with disabilities
have firm opinions on the language used to describe them, their views are not
consistent. Neither do they always seem entirely logical.

As with the language of race and sex, the language of
disability has become highly politicised. It’s generally accepted that words such as
“cripple”, “spastic” and “mongol” are now out of favour. What used to be the
Crippled Children Society got around this problem by renaming itself CCS
Disability Action.

There may be nothing inherently offensive in these words but
they are considered pejorative, so we avoid them. (Interestingly, my Chambers
Dictionary describes “cripple” and “mongol” as offensive but not “spastic”,
although the latter is more commonly used as a term of derision.)

Slightly more perplexing is the recent taboo on the word “handicapped”.It is not, as far as I can see, a derogatory
or judgmental term. For decades it was part of the name of the organisation
that represents people with intellectual disabilities – it’s what the “H” in
IHC (intellectually handicapped children) stands for.

My dictionary defines a handicap as a physical or mental
disability that results in partial or total disability to perform social,
occupational or other normal everyday activities. Alternatively, it’s something
that hinders or impedes.

These are factual, neutral statements. To me the word
“handicapped” carries no connotations that are not also conveyed by “disabled”.
Yet “disabled” is acceptable to most people with disabilities (“impairment”
seems okay too), but “handicapped” is not. I have to ask, what’s the
difference?

Even “disabled” is too discriminatory for some, although the
organisation that speaks assertively for people with disabilities calls itself the Disabled
Persons Assembly. Many disabled people also bridle at the use of terms such as “special
needs” and “wheelchair-bound”.

Sometimes the objections seem to come down to hair-splitting
semantics. One disabled woman interviewed for One in Five admitted that she depended on her wheelchair, yet
didn’t like the phrase “wheelchair-bound”. But it’s only a figure of speech – a
slightly easier way of saying “wheelchair-dependent”, which in her case was
literally true.

Someone else on the programme said we should look at
the person first and the impairment after that, a position I can sympathise
with. In other words you should say “a person who is blind” rather than “a
blind person”; but in practical, everyday terms, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone
to observe such fine distinctions.

And just to confuse the issue, it’s apparently okay to talk
about “deaf people” because, as someone said on the programme, “they [deaf
people] have their own culture”. But how can the non-disabled be expected to understand
these finer points of difference?

The radio interviewer wanted to know whether people should
refer to “disabled people” or “people with disabilities”, to which the answer
was: “The jury is still out on that one”. All which makes it extremely difficult
for non-disabled people to know which terms are considered acceptable (or in today's jargon, "safe").

People with disabilities seek respect and are entitled to it.
They also want inclusiveness with the wider community and are entitled to that,
too, as far as it’s practicable. But by creating uncertainty and trepidation
over what language to use when dealing with them, they may be unwittingly erecting
a barrier between themselves and the community they wish to interact with.

Listening to One in
Five, it seemed to me there’s a real danger that the non-disabled will be
deterred from engaging with disabled people for fear of causing offence with an
unintentional faux pas. At that point the insistence on “correct” language
risks becoming self-defeating. That’s how much of a minefield the language of
disability has become.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Due respect for Maori culture is one thing. Expecting us to swallow
primitive superstition is quite another – yet I heard a reporter on Morning Report
this morning solemnly relaying a Maori warning that recent volcanic activity on
White Island and Mt Tongariro was a sign that Ruamoko, the god of earthquakes
and volcanoes, was unhappy about the way the government was proceeding with the
partial sale of state assets.

This comes only a couple of weeks after the Maori Council’s
lawyer, Felix Geiringer, invoked the Maori belief in taniwha at the Waitangi
Tribunal hearing on water rights.

I suppose some people might see it as valid to cite taniwha
as symbolic spiritual guardians of the waterways, which is what Geiringer was
trying to convey. But then he went further: “People say ‘in this resource is my
taniwha, my guardian spirit. He protects me, he protects my water resource. He’s
not your taniwha so if you are going to use that resource without my
permission, he will do terrible things to you’.”

This invites ridicule. It crosses the line between politically
correct genuflection to Maori cultural beliefs – which you could argue, at a
stretch, is a legitimate theatrical ploy for a lawyer wanting to wring the most
out of an argument before the Waitangi Tribunal – and outright shamanism. I can
imagine Geiringer’s late father, a notorious contrarian and iconoclast,
snorting with derision.

As if citing taniwha wasn’t bad enough, we’re reduced to an even
more abject embrace of stone-age superstition when the state-owned radio network
can report, with a straight face, that the Maori god of earthquakes and
volcanoes is cutting up rough because he (she?) doesn’t like what the
government is doing.

What next? Will we be told that Tangaroa, the sea god, plans to
unleash a tsunami that will rise up from Wellington Harbour and destroy the
Beehive? Will Radio New Zealand report that John Key is at risk of being hit by
a bolt of lightning directed at his head by Tawhirimatea, the weather god? Once
we start bowing to atavistic mumbo-jumbo, anything becomes possible.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

TAKING advantage of a
friend’s offer of her apartment while she was overseas, my wife and I spent
three nights in Wellington last week.

I spent a cumulative 25 years
of my life in the capital but when I go there now, having lived in the
Wairarapa since 2003, I almost feel like a tourist.

The city is changing, and I
don’t just mean the streets and buildings. We wandered along Oriental Parade
with our daughter and grandsons on a Sunday afternoon and although it seemed
all of Wellington had turned out to enjoy the unseasonably balmy weather, I
didn’t see a single familiar face.

That wouldn’t have happened
20, even 10 years ago. Wellington has always felt to me like a big village, but
the city’s population is turning over.

At my wife’s suggestion, I
took my mountain bike and spent a contented couple of hours re-acquainting
myself with the maze of tracks on Mt Victoria. It reminded me what a fantastic
asset the city has in the Town Belt.

Years ago I railed against
the eco-Nazis who ordered the felling of the mature pines along the spine of Mt
Vic above Alexandra Rd; not being native, they had to go. But I’m pleased to
report that the natives planted in their place are flourishing and within a few
years the worst of the scar should be healed.

The removal of the pines
continues. I spent several minutes admiring the coolness and skill of an
arborist perched about 15 metres above the ground, his chainsaw suspended from
his waist as he supervised the removal of the massive crown of a tree that he
had just lopped off.Working in a tight,
confined space, a crane lowered the unwieldy load to the ground as delicately
as a nurse might place a newborn baby in the arms of its mother.

We appreciated the benefits
of the inner-city lifestyle and the proximity to shops and restaurants. We
enjoyed our first-ever meal at the venerable Monsoon Poon – my daughter
couldn’t believe we’d never been there before – but were less impressed by
another celebrated eatery much favoured by the chattering classes. It was over-rated
and over-priced, just as when we last ate there a decade ago. (A friendly
waitress though – from Ohio.)

As pleasant as it all was, I
was happy, as always, to point the car back over the Rimutaka Hill. There is a
steadily growing colony of Wellington refugees in the Wairarapa, of which
I’m happy to be one.

* * *

AS ALWAYS, the Olympic Games
was a mixture of the uplifting and the irritating.

The buildup was tainted by
repugnant bullying on the part of corporate sponsors determined to protect
their interests against even the most harmless incursions. Corporate
strong-arming, backed by obsequious governments, now seems an inevitable part
of all major sporting events. But that unpleasantness was largely forgotten
once the Games started.

Our competitors generally
distinguished themselves with their grace and dignity, in defeat as well as in
victory. We met a charismatic new star in the person of cyclist Simon van
Velthooven and were reminded what a gentleman Mark Todd is, although under that
laidback exterior he must be ferociously competitive.

Nick Willis and Valerie Adams
carried the huge burden of a nation’s hopes, magnified by unrealistic media
expectations, and earned our admiration for the way they handled their (and
our) disappointment.

Others, including rowers
Hamish Bond and Eric Murray, did their best to perpetuate the traditional image
of New Zealanders as bashful champions, almost apologetic at having drawn
attention to themselves by winning.

No disgrace, then, on the
part of the competitors. But the same can’t be said for some of the media
coverage, which brought out our least attractive national traits.

New Zealand’s first gold
medal was the cue for an avalanche of triumphalism and hyperbole on TVNZ, with laughable
references to a “gold rush”. On such occasions the nationalistic chest-thumping
of some in the media stands in striking contrast to the modesty of our
athletes.

Similarly, the petty (and, as
it turned out, premature) gloating over our medal count against that of
Australia exposed one of the less desirable traits in the national psyche,
laying bare our inferiority complex and touchiness toward our big neighbour.

* * *

THE SO-CALLED war on terror
isn’t just being lost in godforsaken Afghanistan. We’ve capitulated closer to
home too.

English playwright Richard
Bean, interviewed by Kim Hill on Saturday, told how he had been commissioned to write a new version of the classical Greek play Lysistrata,
in which the women of Greece withheld sex from their husbands to dissuade them
from war.

Bean decided to put an Islamic spin on the drama. In his adaptation, the women
of Greece were replaced by the 12 virgins of paradise who reward Islamic
martyrs. The theatre company that commissioned his play loved it, but was too
terrified of reprisals to stage it.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Here’s a statistic that might radically change your
perception of the country you live in: in the 2006 census, nearly 40 percent of
the people living in Auckland were born overseas.

As Massey University sociologist Paul Spoonley pointed out
recently on the TV programme Q+A,
that makes Auckland one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world.

Spoonley observed that New Zealanders tend to equate large
immigrant populations with megacities like London and Los Angeles. Many of us –
and I include myself here – still mistakenly regard Australia as a more
multicultural society than ours, because for decades it was.

The New Zealand I grew up in was essentially monocultural; in
parts of New Zealand, even Maori were virtually invisible. There were Chinese
market gardeners and greengrocers, Greek and Yugoslav fish and chip shop
owners, Dutch builders (the Dutch being considered by New Zealand governments
in the 1950s and 60s as the next best option after the British) and Italian
fishing communities, while in urban areas such as Porirua and South Auckland from
the 1960s onward there were concentrations of Pacific Islanders, essentially
imported to provide a cheap workforce for labour-intensive industries such as
car assembly plants. But overall, our immigration policy targeted people of
British origin.

Australia pursued a much more adventurous policy, recruiting
large numbers of immigrants from southern Europe and the near Middle East. As a
result, Australia in the 1960s and 70s was an infinitely more vibrant and
cosmopolitan society.

But how things have changed. Population statistics confirm
what should be apparent to anyone walking down Auckland’s Queen Street: New
Zealand has undergone a quiet revolution. In a remarkably short time, we have
been transformed from one of the western world’s most homogeneous societies
into one of the most ethnically diverse. Spoonley describes Auckland as one of
the world’s major destination cities, comparing it with Toronto and Vancouver.

Not only has immigration increased, but immigrants have
become far more visible because many of them are from China, India, Korea and
the Philippines.

And although this is most obvious in our biggest city, don’t
make the mistake of thinking it’s purely an Auckland thing. Overall, 23 percent
of the New Zealand population in 2006 (our most recent census, since the one
scheduled for 2010 was cancelled after the Christchurch earthquake) was born
overseas.

To someone of my generation, this is a change of staggering
proportions.

As revolutions go, it could hardly have been quieter. I
don’t recall the government making a dramatic policy announcement to the effect
that New Zealand would be opening its doors to the world. There was no great
debate, no public meetings. It happened incrementally and largely without fuss.

A few questioning voices were heard. Veteran Auckland
journalist Pat Booth wrote a controversial series of articles in 1993 warning
of an “Asian invasion” and Winston Peters’ New Zealand First Party tried,
without much success, to make political capital out of the inflow of “non-traditional”
immigrants in 1996.

More recently another journalist, Deborah Coddington,
provoked outrage with a magazine article about Asian crime in New Zealand
(which is undeniably an issue, although many of Coddington’s critics would have
had us believe otherwise).

By and large, however, New Zealanders have absorbed the
newcomers without conflict or tension, confirming our reputation as generally
tolerant, easy-going people.

Spoonley thinks we’re now more accepting of immigrants than
Australia is, and made the point on Q+A
that New Zealand had been spared the type of unpleasantness that Sydney
experienced with the Cronulla riots in 2005, when an incident involving macho young
Lebanese men triggered an ugly backlash from mobs of Australian-born yobbos. Neither
side emerged with any credit.

That confrontation showed how immigration can backfire,
particularly when clannish immigrant groups fail to integrate with the host
society and even exhibit overt hostility toward it. It was a reminder that
immigration has to be managed carefully – a lesson also driven home by the
European experience with large-scale Muslim immigration, which has had
catastrophic consequences.

But the New Zealand immigration experience, thus far at
least, has been painless. Most New Zealanders seem to welcome the colour and
diversity provided by immigrant communities.

It’s not just a matter of relishing the choice of Indian,
Chinese, Thai or Turkish cuisine where once we were condemned to dine out on
steak and eggs or roast meat with three veg, or sushi as opposed to a meat pie.
There’s strong evidence that Asian immigration is good for us academically as
well; many of the top performers in our schools are the children of migrants.

That could eventually translate into an improved economic
performance. And as our population ages (by the mid-2020s, over-65s will
outnumber under-15s), we may have reason to be very grateful for the economic
contribution made by clever, hard-working Asians.

They’re even making an impact in sport. Just look at the
remarkable Lydia Ko, at 15 the top-ranked amateur woman golfer in the world,
and Danny Lee, the youngest-ever winner of the US Amateur Championship, and now
playing on the PGA Tour.

The European experience tells us that immigration causes problems
when large, economically deprived immigrant communities become ghetto-ised and
alienated. That risk multiplies when the immigrant community has dogmatic
religious views that are at odds with the host society.

But it doesn’t have to happen that way. America, one of the
world’s most polyglot societies, has been remarkably successful in absorbing
large numbers of immigrants and making them feel they have a common stake in
the country’s destiny. Canada seems to be managing too. There’s no reason New
Zealand can’t do the same.

If there’s one segment of the New Zealand population for
whom immigration presents a special challenge, it’s Maori. A leaked Labour
Department report last year revealed that Maori are more likely than any other
immigrant group to be against immigration.

Many Maori feel threatened by immigration because they’re
concerned that newcomers don’t understand the relationship between Maori and
Pakeha, have no affinity with Maori culture and may not feel committed to the
Treaty of Waitangi. They’re probably also worried that as immigrant numbers
increase, Maori political influence will diminish.

As Spoonley points out, there’s the matter of economic
competition too. “The new immigrants are
typically skilled, so are they taking [jobs] from Maori? I think that’s where
the concern comes from,” he said on Q+A.
To which many New Zealanders might reply that it would be no bad thing if
economic competition incentivised more Maori to fulfil their economic
potential.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

WHEN a presumably deranged young man sprayed a crowded
cinema with gunfire, killing 12 people and wounding dozens of others, there
followed the usual anguished self-examination in the American media.

As when similar terrible events have happened in the past, attention
focussed on America’s permissive gun laws. But is there another aspect to this
tragedy that was overlooked?

It seemed significant that the shooter, James Holmes, chose
to embark on his murderous spree at the premiere of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises. It was reported
later that Batman posters and a Batman mask were found in his apartment,
suggesting some sort of infantile fixation with the caped crusader. Other
reports suggested Holmes identified with Batman’s nemesis, the Joker.

In the circumstances, you have to wonder whether the popular
obsession with fantasy has got out of hand.

Why any adult would take a comic-book character like Batman seriously
is a mystery. In the 1960s, television quite rightly treated him as a subject
of camp satire. Yet film critics solemnly analyse Batman films (and other equally
ridiculous “superhero” films such as the Spiderman
series) as if they had the weight of works by Shakespeare or Chekhov.

Fans certainly take Batman far too seriously, as was evident
from the furious response that was triggered when negative reviews of the new
film started appearing online. Movie websites were swamped with messages so
toxic and malicious that some sites had to be shut down.

If fans can be so emotionally attached to Batman that they
respond to mildly critical reviews with rabid threats and vicious abuse, is it
any wonder that Holmes should be so obsessed that he chose the screening of the
film to play out his own lethal, overheated fantasy?

It may defy rational understanding, but it can’t be ruled
out.

Fantasy movies are now a Hollywood staple. Many are dark and
violent and depict a dystopian society.The
same is true of many video games, which are so important to some men that they
will pulverise their partners’ crying babies into silence so that they can
continue playing uninterrupted.

Obsession with fantasy is the new norm. TV series about
vampires rate their socks off. In the top-rating comedy series The Big Bang Theory, the main characters
frequent comic-book stores and imagine themselves as characters from Star Trek or Doctor Who. This is presented as endearing rather than absurd.

Comic-Con conventions such as the one recently held in San
Diego attract more than 100,000 fans, all of them immersed in fantasy of one
sort or another, whether it’s science-fiction, horror or vampirism. They seem locked
in a strange, perpetual adolescence.

No doubt for most of the people who attend events like
Comic-Con, it’s harmless fun. But we shouldn’t be surprised if occasionally,
someone totally loses the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality,
with tragic consequences.

* * *

SPEAKING of fantasies, director Sir Peter Jackson, director
of The Hobbit, recently revealed that
the Tolkien estate doesn’t like his movies. I’m not surprised.

I don’t believe Jackson has treated J R R Tolkien’s stories
with the respect they deserve. He has taken Tolkien’s profound fables and
turned them into noisy, pointless action spectacles.

Jackson is an immensely talented man but it seems a common
characteristic of the films he’s involved in – whether it’s The Adventures of Tintin, The Lord of the Rings or District 9 – that no matter how
promisingly they start, they eventually degenerate into ridiculous
extravaganzas in which any trace of nuance or subtlety is buried under layers
of furious action and special effects.

* * *

ANOTHER Maori Language Week has come and gone, and with it
the now-familiar lamentations that te reo is in decline and must be
resuscitated. But as someone commented on the Stuff website: “If a language
needs rescuing, it’s already too late.”

Maori will survive as a language if there is a compelling
economic or cultural reason for it. But if it’s still struggling after 37 years
of Maori language weeks, 31 years of kohanga reo and eight years of Maori TV,
perhaps it should be taken off life support and left to cope as best it can.

Black American linguist John McWhorter has argued that most
languages ultimately outlive their usefulness and cannot be sustained by
artificial means.

Perhaps more importantly, McWhorter makes the point that a
multiplicity of languages encourages segregation and apartness. As he says: “The prospect we are taught to
dread – that one day all the world’s people will speak one language – is one I
would welcome.”

And we should look on the bright side. There may be fewer
people able to converse in Maori, but the number of Maori words and phrases in
common usage by Pakeha is infinitely greater than it was; and what’s more, many
more Pakeha are making an effort to pronounce Maori names correctly.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.